Apple says it will remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its App Store, after experts attribute a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarettes
Amid growing health concerns over e-cigarettes, Apple will remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its mobile App Store this morning, Axios has learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's purge of all 181 vaping-related apps extends a curatorial instinct it has exercised before, but for a new reason. The earlier precedents in our coverage were defensive or compliance-driven — the XcodeGhost malware removals in 2015 and the waves of China-store delistings tied to Beijing's game-license deadlines (26K+ games pulled in August 2020, then 46K+ more by the year-end cutoff) — whereas this removal is preemptive public-health gatekeeping against apps that broke no stated rule.
First-order effects
- The developers behind those 181 apps lose access to iOS distribution overnight, cutting them off from an App Store that Apple says draws more than 800 million weekly visitors.
Second-order effects
- Google comes under immediate pressure to match the move on Android, a dynamic already visible when Unjected scrubbed its social feed after a Google warning ahead of Apple's own COVID-19 misinformation removal; vape hardware sellers also lose their primary app-based sales and support channel.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, App Store curation shifts from security hygiene and local-law compliance toward discretionary category bans on health and safety grounds, making a handful of platform companies de facto regulators of which product categories reach consumers.
The trend: App Store governance is expanding from malware cleanup and government-license enforcement into unilateral, morality-and-health-driven category bans, with each removal setting the template for the next.